Amid my crippling Universes Beyond fatigue, I find myself desperate for a return to Magic: The Gathering's rich original setting. The upcoming MTG set, Reality Fracture, offers an intriguing subversion of Magic's established canon, turning the edifice on its head as part of an effort from hubristic mind-mage Jace Beleren to make his own, sanitised universe. On August 28, Wizards published a juicy lore preview for the set, giving us plenty to chew on ahead of its launch on October 2.
Reality Fracture is something of a departure from MTG sets of the past. Starting off in an effort to escape the trauma of the Phyrexian Invasion and the scars it left on the Multiverse, Jace Beleren started with a thought experiment: what if the universe had simply been better? As Wizards' latest lore article tells us, this didn't go well, and eventually wound up with the worst possible version of Jace creating his own pet dimension: The Echoverse.
While the Echoverse departs from the known MTG Multiverse in a wide variety of ways, the article focuses on Hexhaven Academy, a dark, militaristic mirror to the whimsical magical school of Strixhaven. Here, Jace rules from a great tower on the campus, filled with faceless guards and impossible, twisting corridors.
In the Echoverse, Hexhaven is surrounded by a deadly wasteland populated by mage-eating horrors known as The Eradia. In response to this threat, the five schools of Hexhaven subject their students to rigorous military training to produce battlemages.
Five Schools make up the glorified military academy: the diviners of Fatehold, the knowledge-hungry Theorix, the building-obsessed Konstrari, the invasive healers of Vigorbloom, and the battlepoets of Stingerquill.
To add to the dystopian horror, Jace forces every cadet to wear a badge bearing the likeness of his own eye and deliberately trains the students to make them more susceptible to mind-reading. It's darkly compelling stuff, and I can't wait to see more.
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